Friday, February 29, 2008

OpenRules Rule Compressor

The people over at OpenRules have developed some very cool technology with their Rule Compressor. Given any decision table the compressor looks for redundant rule combinations and removes them.

If I have two rows in the decision table that look like this:if age > 50 then decrease price by 10%if age > 65 then decrease price by 10%

We have redundancy there and it can be combined into a single rule:if age > 50 then decrease price by 10%

This is obviously a very simple case and the Rule Compressor can do much more complex combinations. I've taken the liberty of taking a screen shot from a section showing an example from their Rule Compressor explanation page: